Category Archives: Technology and Society

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

AR-15s

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Why young women want them:

Imagining ourselves in a high-stress, violent situation, we want a gun with enough ammo, and more, to get the job done. Sometimes, you only get one shot. At other times, you may need more. When you don’t have time to reload in the heat of a home invasion, the AR-15’s 30-round magazine gives you the flexibility and security a handgun will not.

High-capacity magazines serve as a life-saving insurance mechanism, a self-defense back-up if something doesn’t go according to plan. Yet you would never think of these guns in this sense by listening to anti-gun zealots and their allies in media.

Assault rifles and high-capacity magazines have been under fire from our nation’s legislators since the Newtown massacre. It only took Senator Dianne Feinstein two days to announce her intention to reinstate the Clinton-era assault-weapons ban to get “these dangerous weapons of war off our streets.” New York governor Andrew Cuomo took it upon himself to make his state the first to tighten gun laws post-Newtown, proudly outlawing magazines over seven rounds because “no one needs ten bullets to kill a deer.”

Senator Feinstein and Governor Cuomo: We may not need ten bullets to kill a deer, but we sure need them in our own defense. Criminals rarely use assault rifles. Nearly ten times as many murders are committed with hammers and clubs, and 35 times as many with knives. Does that mean we need to ban those too, Senator Feinstein? Banning assault weapons will only take weapons away from my house — not from criminals on the street.

God made man and woman. Sam Colt made them equal.

Of course, it’s not really about keeping them away from criminals, unless you consider free men and women who might thwart your plans for them to be inherently criminals.

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

A Plague On The Earth

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That’s what misanthrope extremist David Attenborough thinks of humanity.

I suspect he also wants to confine the infection to a single planet.

And as always, my advice to such people is to lead by example.

[Update a while later]

Here’s another person who should lead by example. Paul Ehrlich, who’s been wrong about pretty much all of his predictions for forty years, says that no one has a right to twelve, or even three children.

Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The New York Magazine Ban

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…is probably unconstitutional:

Whether by clever design, simple ignorance, or haste-induced inattention, these provisions in effect have turned the most popular handguns bought for self-defense and recreational purposes — 9mm and .40 caliber semi-automatic pistols — into expensive paper weights, unusable for their intended and wholly lawful purposes. That’s because, with the exception of a small number of small 9mm “pocket pistols” and a slightly larger number of .40-caliber pistols — there are no seven-round magazines produced or available (magazines produced for semi-automatic pistols normally hold eight or more rounds). Thus, although the most popular handguns themselves remain legal under the New York law, the magazines that are necessary for them to work have been declared illegal.

As he notes, this is a de facto ban of all hand guns other than revolvers, and as the court ruled in Heller, far too sweeping to pass Second Amendment muster. Also, expect the “assault weapon” ban to be challenged as well. The federal version expired prior to Heller, so it hasn’t been tested.

Humor, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society, Weird

A Novel Means Of Cooking A Steak

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Not a very effective one, though:

To break the sound barrier, you’ll need to drop the steak from about 50 kilometers. But this isn’t enough to cook it.

We need to go higher.

If dropped from 70 kilometers, the steak will go fast enough to be briefly blasted by 350°F air. Unfortunately, this blast of thin, wispy air barely lasts a minute—and anyone with some basic kitchen experience can tell you that a steak placed in the oven at 350 for 60 seconds isn’t going to be cooked.

From 100 kilometers—the formally defined edge of space—the picture’s not much better. The steak spends a minute and a half over Mach 2, and the outer surface will likely be singed, but the heat is too quickly replaced by the icy stratospheric blast for it to actually be cooked.

I think I’ll stick to my IR grill. Though it might be fun to apply for a NASA grant as a suborbital research payload.

Science And Society, Technology and Society

DNA

1 Comment

Precise multiple editing has arrived:

Just to get your mind around this feat, imagine taking about 5,000 different novels and reprinting them in normal font size on 23 very long cotton ribbons. Since each word takes up about half an inch, the ribbons, placed end to end, would stretch for roughly three million miles-120 times around the world. But to be a bit more realistic, twist and tangle the ribbons so much that they only go around the planet once.

One of the books written on your ribbons is “A Tale of Two Cities,” but you don’t even know which ribbon it is on, let alone where on that ribbon. Your task is to find the clauses “It was the beast of times, it was the worst of times” and correct the misprint.

And now they can do it. The implications are almost unimaginable.